25 Sep 2024
So you’ve done it. You’ve finally decided to start playing guitar after years of telling yourself it was too difficult. But you’re not alone. There are tons of resources online for you to embark on your guitar playing journey. Check out some of these awesome websites where you can find tabs and other useful tips and tricks.
Simply put, there are three main types of guitars: classical, acoustic, and electric. Choosing which one to start with really depends on what you’ll be wanting to play. They are all very similar though, so if you know how to play on one, you’ll definitely be able to play on the other two.
You should only start playing if you really want to. Playing guitar shouldn’t be a chore but something you look forward to when you come back from a long day of work. So pick the guitar that’s right for you!
“They are effectively demystifying what it means to be an artist. They are showing that the guitar is not necessarily an intimidating instrument for virtuosos—it’s a means of expressing yourself.” Molenda (2019)
To measure which genres are popular to play, we will analyse a dataset concerning Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time from 2012. This list is revised every decade so a newer list is available but has not been generously turned into a manipulable dataset and published on data.world like the 2012 list.
We must first load this dataset into R, which can be executed silently. We will also load useful packages at the same time.
There is a variety of subgenres present in the loaded dataset. In a first time, it might be interesting to simply explore how songs were classified. Since these were added to the dataset using a python package, this will also help identify potential misclassifications.
There appears to be issues with some of the songs not being given any genre. Nevertheless, we can still visualise the most represented genres:
There aren’t many repeat artists in the data, and gender is not given so not much can be done here without a larger and more detailed dataset. The code in R for obtaining counts for artists and gender in such a situation is however presented out of interest.
Put in the effort and time and learning the guitar can be very rewarding.
\[\begin{align*} 10,000 \text{ hours} &= \text{Rehearsing} + \text{Motivation} \\ &\Rightarrow \text{Proficiency} \end{align*}\]
The sky is the limit!
Adam Maghout @ UU